My Christmas wish for the Avengers is that they might have more conflict. And how's this for the sake of argument-- let's keep Wolverine in order to do so.
Who would have thought that I would be advocating for Wolverine on an Avengers roster? I'm as surprised as anyone! But the more I think about it, the more it would be nice to have Wolverine, IF he could be a force of personality that would lead to some team-tension. We need some sparks flying between some powerful personalities in the kind of clash we'd come to expect from Marvel hero teams! The problem is that Wolverine is a bit too far afield from his initial edgy and brashy living-on-the-edge wildman neophyte persona. Thankfully, he's not too far away from being a bratty living-on-the-edge crazily grizzled veteran. In other words, he should be violent enough to keep his teammates raising their eyebrows, respected enough that others fear confronting him directly, and just crazy enough that his ideas seem all wrong in prospect but is exactly what is needed in retrospect.
In some ways, Wolverine's basically that mean ol' veteran fisherman that grinds his hands on a chalkboard when he wants your attention and will get your shark for you if you would just shut up and let him do it his way. Or in another analogy, just understand that Wolverine lives his life as if he is a shell-shocked, embittered but ultimately hardened Vietnam soldier wandering through the jungles, and by jungles I mean basically *anywhere he happens to be at any given time.* He puts the "now" in Apocalypse Now. Speaking of apocalypses, Wolverine lives his life as if he is the lone survivor in a dystopian future, which it probably is from his long-lived perspective. So, yeah, put that guy on the Avengers, because the Avengers have to use him as both an asset and a source of worry.
People like Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel have worked with Wolverine enough that they can tell him off, but they are never his "superiors" in any way, so he can always ignore them, and they know that. He is someone better off on 'our side' than left to his own devices, but that means potentially setting him off at any moment, and it means potentially not being able to reel him in when he does.
Aside from Spidey and Ms. M, there's all kinds of tension. How far might Wolverine consider the new Cap as someone who repeated his own mistakes? How much might he resent Iron Man's optimism and self-assuredness? Will he respect Luke Cage as a leader or bristle under anyone giving orders? And it would appear that he is a complete opposite to Iron Fist-- the one who grew up rich to his poor, who became a peaceful martial artist to his berserker killing machine.
Basically, with Wolverine you have an ultimate Lone Wolf (emphasis on the "wolf") brought into what is Earth's mightiest band of brothers. How could we *not* expect conflict-rich story dynamics coming out of that?
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